Judy Holliday recreated her Broadway role in this adaptation of a Garson Kanin play, winning an Oscar for her portrayal of the phenomenally ignorant showgirl Billie Dawn. She and her boyfriend Broderick Crawford, a scrap-metal magnate, are one of the screen's most brilliantly abusive couples as they lunge and shout about their elegant Washington D.C. hotel suite. When William Holden, the tutor hired to smooth out Billie's rough edges, instructs her in the rudiments of diction and democracy, we witness the dawn of a new Billie. Holliday, with her unique grandiloquence, made the dumb-blonde into an icon of stupidity that begged for another reading. (The film itself links an ignorant populace and nouveau-riche political gangsterism as dual threats to a democracy.) Director Cukor characterized Holliday as "quiet and sensitive, brilliantly intelligent and very highbrow...Like Fanny Brice and all the great comediennes, Judy had something that could suddenly move you to tears right in the middle of the funniest scene."